Blog

August 19, 2009

Re. TFS 2008 deployment we've come to the point where we need to have two build servers (VMs - Virtual Machines) making build at the same time. This is because of restrictions on TFS 2008 Build agent that can make only one build concurrently. Yes, there is a way to tweak TFS 2008 build server and have additional port 9192 used; however it is proven to be too complicated in our scenario, plus making VM nowadays is way easierJ.

Anyway, to accommodate this request here is what we did:

We created two VMs:

A.    First build server called "B1 VM" that will continuously make builds using source files stored in TFS 2008

B.    Second build server called "B2 VM" that will, depending on the results of the build made on "B1 VM" do the following:

1.    Make new build

2.    Deploy client's database tier on "B2 VM"

3.    Deploy client's web application tier on "B2 VM"

4.    Execute NUnit test(s) against the web application deployed in the previous step

5.    Remote execute QTP test(s) hosted on separate VM - "QTP VM" against the web application deployed on "B2 VM"

6.    Provide feedback based on results of the steps 4 and 5

Take a look at this image to understand it better…

July 8, 2009

Finally we got some traction. MSVS 2008 - TFS 2008 is going well. We managed to automate the following:

1. Trigger TFS Build making

2. Execute MS SQL dbase scrips to create dbases and populate tables for the client's application

3. Deploy application installer

4. Run NUnit testing

5. Run QTP testing

6. Email subscribed users with results

7. Repeat the process

Although it may sound easy, trust us it wasn't. We had to do a lot of custom scripting in the TFSBuild.proj and do trial-and-error testing before settling for the version that is running now.We're not "out of the woods" yet; however we're going in the right direction.

Fingers crossed...

Keep in touch...

Cheers, Voja